What the EB layer *can't* do

[ocaisa]

I was looking over https://github.com/EESSI/easybuild-layer/wiki/Brainstorm-meeting-(June-9th-2020) and I was wondering if there are things we need to consider that perhaps we can't completely handle within the EasyBuild layer. These are what popped into my head (and some may actually be possible, I just didn't know), but there may be things that others can think of:

• What about system-tuning of performance critical installations like MPI, HDF5, ...? Can we actually provide these so that they "just work"? If sites are expected to provide/build key parts of the the stack themselves, how do we allow that and how do we document how to do that?

• What about things like the nvidia drivers or SLURM/PBS/... integration of the MPI runtime. Can we supply drivers at the Gentoo layer?

• What about, e.g., Cray machines? The archs are the same but they will need custom toolchains. How do we account for site-specific requirements (like ParaStation MPI at JSC) . At the very least we need a policy in this regard.

• How do we recommend sites to influence the stack (through environment variables or whatever)? Is that a case where they should consider a hook with --module-only and actually build the module tree themselves?

[ocaisa]

All of these have been addressed in some way, closing